W. B. SELBIE WILL BE NOBLE LECTURER FOR THIS SPRING

The William Belden Noble lecturer this year is to be W. B. Selbie, principal of Mansfield College, Oxford. He will speak at Phillips Brooks House in April.

The Noble lectures were founded in 1897 by Mrs. Noble in memory of her husband who was an Episcopal clergyman. Her purpose in establishing the fund for these lectures was to continue the influence and mission of her husband as a minister, and to arouse the interest of Harvard students in the Christian ministry.

Selbie is the principal of Mansfield College which is one of the two or three Non-conformist theological schools in Oxford. He is one of the leaders of the English Congregational church and is generally recognized as one of the most religiously influential men in Oxford. His connection with the city and the university has been a close one. Several times he has visited the United States, but he has not been here recently.

Closer Relations Is Aim

For the last nine or ten years, with but one exception, the Noble lecture has been used as an occasion to invite visiting scholars and churchmen from England to Harvard in the hope that by their speaking here they might at the same time tend to establish closer relations between the English and American churches and universities.

Out of the 22 lectures which have taken place since the fund was instituted, many of them have been delivered by distinguished men. Some of the better known lecturers in the past include the Reverend Henry Van Dyke; Professor George Herbert Palmer '64, Alford Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy, and Civil Polity, emeritus; the Right Reverend William Boyd Carpenter, Bishop of Ripon; the Right Reverend Charles H. Brent, Bishop of the Philippine Islands, Theodore Roosevelt '80; Wilfred T. Grenfell; the Right Reverend Arthur Cayley Headlam, Bishop of Gloucester; and the Reverend W. R. Matthews, Dean of Kings College, London University.